Digital photography has recently overcome traditional film photography with the low cost of digital cameras, the high quality of digital photographs, and the flexibility of transferring the digital images to others. Moreover, digital images allow for one to view the captured images on a digital display interface screen such as a display interface screen of a computer or tablet. Users may store their digital images on a stored medium, such as a disc or a solid state drive, and share the digital medium with others. Additionally, a user may upload their digital images to a website for storage or for sharing with others via a social networking site or online photo album website. Despite the many options available for viewing digital images on a display interface screen, many users still wish to print a hard copy of a captured image for viewing and sharing.
For example, users may acquire a personal photo printer to print digital images out at home. This conventional technique can be very expensive given the costs of the printing equipment, the photograph quality printing paper, and the ink. Other techniques of printing digital images include transferring and storing a captured digital image on a storage medium and physically traveling to a retail store to print out the digital image from the storage medium. This technique is time consuming and cumbersome. More recently, retail stores have offered printing services via their website on the Internet. Users may upload a digital image to the website of the retail store and have the digital images delivered via the mail. Again, this technique is time consuming, as it requires the photographer to wait for the prints to be delivered. More recently, sophisticated image capturing and sharing software has become available for smartphones that allow a user to capture an image and immediately share the image with a third party social networking site. Users may view the captured images via their smartphone or via the website or mobile application of the social networking website.
Because smartphones allow for easy and fast image uploads, social networking websites have rapidly become a hub for users to share digital images with each other, and as a result, social networking websites now maintain some of the largest repositories of digital images. Moreover, social networking websites allow users to generate a multitude of information or attributes associated with each image including user comments, identifying other users in an image, a location and a date of the image, etc. With the ever-increasing number of uploaded images and associated information, users may quickly become overwhelmed in locating a particular image to view or to print out. Furthermore, even if a user locates a particular image, the user is unable to print the image and the associated information or attributes.